Life Under the Bubble

Reprint from October 2010 © Discover Media LLC www.B2science.com from u•s airways magazine Life under the bubble By Jordan Fisher Smith machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total Photographs by Douglas Adesko water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier. Biosphere 2 was one of the most lauded experiments of the 1990s, Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment then one of the most ridiculed. Now it is back, offering a unique way to seized upon the ways in which the project had failed. Chief among these put theories about climate and environment to the test. was an inability of Biosphere 2’s atmosphere to sustain human life. As was Biosphere 2 has stood amid the palo verde, mesquite, and ocotillo true outside, the problem was signaled by rising carbon dioxide. By 1996 southwest of Oracle, Arizona, for less than 20 years, yet it looks decidedly Biosphere 2 had passed into the hands of Columbia University, and later aged. Its skin is mostly glass and lacks window-washing tracks, so the the University of Arizona took over. Both used it to run scenarios of global hundreds of panes had to be cleaned by workers climate and atmospheric change. In its later life, instead hanging on ropes like rock climbers. At one time seven people were employed to do this; today there are none. The desert wind deposits dust on the structure and the rain washes it downward, forming parallel streaks. The rain forest inside pushes against the glass. In 2003 there were about 150 employees on the site. Less than a third remain. Dry leaves collect against the air handlers by the main doorway: whiptail lizards skitter over the concrete paths, and javelinas trot around the grounds at night. A note on a whiteboard in the operating engineers office tallies the number of poisonous reptiles encountered on the site, which is greater than the number of maintenance people left to encounter them: “Rattlesnakes: 17.” The café is closed, the mission control building de- serted, and inside the row of clear plastic sheds where plants were readied for installation in the main structure, towering exotics — Panama hat palm, angel’s trumpet — stand bleached and lifeless where they perished when the water was turned off. A mono- chrome monitor displays the last numbers it ever knew, burned into its dead screen. On the shelf below is the 1986 manual for the environmental monitor- ing system to which it was connected. Nothing ages faster than the future. Constructed between 1987 and 1991. Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a min- iature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1” — Earth — and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in discover called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 8o percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and Page 1 of 5 Reprint from October 2010 © Discover Media LLC www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued of trying to model utopia, Biosphere 2 would actually model dystopia — oil fortune. Later that year Allen and his followers drove an old school bus a future plagued by high carbon dioxide levels — wrote Rebecca Reider, to Berkeley, California, where they built an 82-foot sailboat. None of them author of a definitive history of the project. But while most research on had ever built even a rowboat. In 1975 they began sailing the Heraclitus impending environmental disaster relied on computer models, Biosphere 2 around the world. They took her up the Amazon River, dove coral reefs in represented a fascinating alternative mode in which large-scale analog the tropics, and sailed her to Antarctica to do research on whales. experiments employed real organisms, soil, seawater, and air. With John Allen’s big dreams and Ed Bass’s big money, the Synergians The man behind Biosphere 2, was John Allen, a Colorado School of began taking on bigger things. They acquired a huge cattle ranch in Mines-trained metallurgist and Harvard MBA. In 1963, after two halluci- Australia, started a sustainable forest in Puerto Rico, built a hotel and nogenic experiences on peyote. Allen looked out of the Manhattan office cultural center in Kathmandu, and took on other projects in Nepal, the building in which he was working and realized he could not open the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Now calling themselves window. He felt trapped like a bug inside glass — an ironic epiphany for a the Institute for Ecotechnics, they began hosting international meetings man who would work so hard to seal up a handful of his followers three on ecology, sustainable development, and then space colonization. At a decades hence. So he sailed from New York aboard a freighter and traveled conference in Oracle in 1984, Allen announced his plan to build a prototype the world, seeking wisdom. By 1967 he had become a self-styled esoteric Mars colony on Earth before the decade was out. The destiny of human teacher in Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco, delivering weekly lectures to beings was to seed Earth’s life into space, and first stop would be a working a group of mostly younger followers and cohabitants. In 1968 he and his colony on Mars. students went to New York to set up a theater company, and from there The principals of the institute broke ground for Biosphere 2 in January to New Mexico, where they started a commune near Santa Fe. If most 1987. If some of them lacked academic qualifications for the jobs they held, such counterculture experiments yielded to entropy and poverty, Allen’s they enlisted real experts to execute the design. Walter Adey, a geologist at Synergia Ranch is a notable exception. The Synergians were a very hard- the Smithsonian Institution, was in charge of the ocean. The rain forest was working bunch. the domain of Sir Ghillean Prance, then director of the New York Botanical In 1974 a lanky young Texan and Yale dropout named Ed Bass wandered Garden. These and other experts installed 3,800 species of life inside, even up the driveway to Synergia Ranch. Like Allen, Bass had a strong interest in as cranes lifted great sections of white the environment. Unlike Allen, he was the billionaire heir to an Page 2 of 5 Reprint from October 2010 © Discover Media LLC www.B2science.com Life under the bubble continued superstructure into place overhead. The majesty and complexity of the proj- and releasing oxygen, but they also do the reverse. Plants, too, respire (or ect entranced the press, touching on myth and religious narrative. Rebecca breathe), burning carbohydrates to do work like making branches and roots. Reider wrote. Time called it “Noah’s Ark: The Sequel.” This created expecta- In the soil around their roots, billions of fungi and soil bacteria respire as tions that would be hard to meet. well. In fact, the greater part of all “breathing” in terrestrial systems goes on In September 1991, four women and four men in NASA-style jumpsuits underground. entered the air lock of Biosphere 2. Twelve days into the mission, Jane Ever grand in their ambitions, Allen and his people intended Biosphere 2 Poynter, a young Englishwoman in charge of the farm, put her hand in a to be used by rotating crews for 100 years. Feeling they had one shot to threshing machine while winnow- invest their world with life-giving nutrients, they had loaded their soils ing rice. The group’s doctor sewed with compost and rich muck from the bottom of a cattle pond. (Agricultural the tip of her middle finger back chemicals used inside might end up in their air and water.) When the air on, but the graft didn’t take and locks closed, soil bacteria had a massive party, exhaling carbon dioxide and she was evacuated for surgery. She tipping the balance the wrong way. returned in only a few hours to As oxygen was converted to carbon dioxide, free oxygen in the atmo- serve out the two-year mission, but sphere declined. By January 1993, Biosphere 2’s carbon dioxide levels were when she reentered the air lock, a 12 times that of the outside, and oxygen levels were what mountaineers duffel bag was placed inside with get at 17,000 feet. The crew’s doctor was having trouble adding up simple her. It contained nothing of sub- figures and disqualified himself from duty. So, a year and four months into stance, Poynter said — some circuit the mission, tank trucks containing 31,000 pounds of liquid oxygen started boards and a planting plan for the driving up the access road to the site. rain forest — but the media had a The story of fresh-faced idealists getting taken down a notch played The eight original Biospherians on the field day with it, along with the fact well in the media. For two years the glass walls of Biosphere 2 were lined first day of their two-year mission: September 26 , 1991.

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